Archive for December, 2016

The Trump Bar opened at noon, and one of the first customers was the street performer known as the Naked Cowboy. His normal turf is Times Square, but he’s been spending a lot of time at Trump Tower. He ordered—“Vodka with a splash of orange juice”—and took a corner stool. Over his shoulder were a TV and a magnum of Trump Champagne. He wore his signature getup—cowboy boots, cowboy hat, and Fruit of the Loom briefs with “Trump” on the rear—plus a silk boxer’s robe decorated with the Stars and Stripes. “I wear it while I’m indoors, out of respect,” he said. “I have an affinity with Trump. I get him. We’re both media promoters, media whores, whatever you want to call it. People get hung up on political stuff, but I don’t care. Black, white, gay, transvestite—just stand up and make something of yourself. Look, my wife’s a Mexican immigrant. She still doesn’t have her papers. Maybe she’ll be the next to be deported, who knows? I don’t think he’d do that. But if he does, hey, that’s fate. Plus, it’s a nice thing to have hanging over her head—you know, ‘Do the dishes, or else.’ ”

It was also expected that The Nazi would contribute a draft. In German.

Then came word that Mongo himself would get out the crayons and butcher paper, and laboriously scrawl out some Mongbonics:

President-elect Mongo has gotten involved in penning his inaugural address, planning to craft a speech himself that he will keep short so supporters traveling to Washington for the ceremony won’t have to stand out in the cold.

Who knows?

It is possible that Beelzebub will weary of all these middlemen, and inscribe the address himself, in words of fire, which he will then flare out the mouth of Mongo . . . sorta like how it was with that demon-possessed kid in the true-life documentary film The Exorcist.

In the meantime, the conch shells, who are quietly monitoring every move of the Mongo, have vouchsafed unto me a copy of the most recent draft grunted up by the short-fingered vulgarian. Some excerpts follow:

—”Ask not what Mongo do for you, ask what you do for Mongo. What do for Mongo? Bomb newspapers! Newspapers mean to Mongo! Make rubble!”

—”Mongo have infrastructure! Make Chinese build railroads, like in Make America Great Again days. For food, they eat Mexicans—solve rapist immigration problem! Railroad ties, them made of Muslims! Greased in pig fat! HAR-HAR-HAR!”

—”Mongo make swear of allegiance to Israel always! Unlike bad Kenyan president. Mongo only puzzlement about Israel: why so many Jews there? Should go somewhere else! Vlad take—Siberia need more peoples! Bannon say put Jews on trains, but make stop on way, for showers. Get clean!”

—”Four score and seven years ago—Mongo not born yet! Still in daddy’s penis!”

—”Government must save money. Spend too much! So Mongo get rid of food stamp program. Poor can eat dirt, like in Haiti! Nutritious! Mongo use saved money to gild his advisors. Make pretty, all shiny!”

—”Mongo make jobs program for Negroids living in hellholes. These pedal stationary bicycles to generate electricity. Put in homes of white peoples. Everyone benefit—black people have jobs, white people have power, Mongo have hellholes, where mowed down and replaced with Mongo hotels!”

Hungary, my country, has in the past half-decade morphed from an exemplary post-Cold War democracy into a populist autocracy. Here are a few eerie parallels that have made it easy for Hungarians to put Donald Trump on their political map: Prime Minister Viktor Orban has depicted migrants as rapists, job-stealers, terrorists and “poison” for the nation, and built a vast fence along Hungary’s southern border. The popularity of his nativist agitation has allowed him to easily debunk as unpatriotic or partisan any resistance to his self-styled “illiberal democracy,” which he said he modeled after “successful states” such as Russia and Turkey.

No wonder Orban feted Trump’s victory as ending the era of “liberal non-democracy,” “the dictatorship of political correctness” and “democracy export.” The two consummated their political kinship in a recent phone conversation; Orban is invited to Washington, where, they agreed, both had been treated as “black sheep” . . . .

A first vital lesson from my Hungarian experience: Do not be distracted by a delusion of impending normalization. Do not ascribe a rectifying force to statutes, logic, necessities or fiascoes.

Call me a typical Hungarian pessimist, but I think hope can be damaging when dealing with populists. For instance, hoping that unprincipled populism is unable to govern. Hoping that Trumpism is self-deceiving, or self-revealing, or self-defeating. Hoping to find out if the president-elect will have a line or a core, or if he is driven by beliefs or by interests. Or there’s the Kremlinology-type hope that Trump’s party, swept to out-and-out power by his charms, could turn against him. Or hope extracted, oddly, from the very fact that he often disavows his previous commitments.

Populists govern by swapping issues, as opposed to resolving them. Purposeful randomness, constant ambush, relentless slaloming and red herrings dropped all around are the new normal. Their favorite means of communication is provoking conflict. They do not mind being hated. Their two basic postures of “defending” and “triumphing” are impossible to perform without picking enemies . . . .

Few developments are more frightening than the populist edition of George Orwell’s dystopia. The world is now dominated by three gigantic powers, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, a.k.a. the United States, Russia and China, and all three are governed by promises of making their realms “great again.”

M.D. Harmon, a conservative columnist who frequently wrote in favor of gun ownership rights for the Portland Press Herald, died this week after being accidentally shot by a teenage boy.

As the Press Herald itself reports, the 71-year-old Harmon was showing off one of his guns to a 16-year-old boy in his home in Sanford, Maine, on Wednesday. Harmon apparently let the teenager handle the weapon, which went off while the boy was holding it.

Harmon was a dedicated defender of gun ownership rights and would regularly rail against attempts to regulate firearms or even make the use of firearms safer.

∞

No tears from me. I was his target.

Not by his gun, but by his toxic, lie-filled, extremist rants against the LGBT community. Every week for years and years he’d pump out the latest bullshit from whatever fake news sources (including lots of hypocritical Bible cherrypicking) caught his eye or his own rancid and fact-free opinions.

Whenever a gay rights vote would come up, either in the legislature or via referendum, he was always on the front lines railing about how people like me were undeserving of equal rights for the most bullshit reasons. That the Press Herald kept this jerk on the payroll for so long defied their mission to shed light on issues, not darkness.

And to think his life ended because he didn’t follow the gun safety rules that he sniffed so pompously about. Of course I’m a responsible gun owner because something something Second Amendment.

And now we’re going to see a bunch of accolades thrown in his direction. How he “celebrated conservatism” and “was a mainstay of the newspaper business for 40 years” and blah blah blah. But at the end of the day, he was a decades-long hate peddler. I offer my condolences to his family and those who will mourn his loss. But I won’t be among them. He was a well-poisoner. And in the end he was felled by his own negligence around guns—an issue on which which he claimed superiority over the liberal gun-control bedwetters he hated with unwavering virulence.